Dr. Barcellos-Hoff received an undergraduate degree in Biopsychology from the University of Chicago in 1978 and a doctoral degree in Experimental Pathology from the University of California, San Francisco in 1986. Her graduate research in experimental pathology was conducted with Dr. Dennis F. Deen on determinants of brain tumor cell response to therapy and her postgraduate research concerning extracellular matrix signaling on mammary epithelial functional differentiation training was conducted at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with Dr. Mina J. Bissell. She established her research laboratory in 1988 to study breast cancer and ionizing radiation. The goal of her research is to understand how multicellular processes are disrupted during the progression from normal to neoplastic.